


there are roads left in both of our shoes

by besselfcn



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Tim, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blindness, Brief suicidal ideation, Disability, F/M, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Referneces to mining disasters, i mean like it's still the magnus archives, mentions of danny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:13:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26570461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: He kisses her, again and again and again. There is no rush. There is nothing waiting in the dark.
Relationships: Melanie King/Tim Stoker
Comments: 12
Kudos: 18





	there are roads left in both of our shoes

**Author's Note:**

> AU wherein Tim survives (somehow?) and finds out about how to quit the archives (somehow?) and also he and Melanie are in love (somehow???)
> 
> [holding tim & melanie in my hands] I just think they're neat

There was an episode Melanie filmed once at the Oaks Colliery in Barnsley. Supposedly the ghosts of the miners who died in the 1866 explosion still roamed those very tunnels, waiting, desperate to move on to the after life, et cetera et cetera. 

She’d done some research for the video beforehand, of course. She never was an amateur. 

The big mining accidents — the ones people remember — are explosions; freak accidents; faulty equipment that sparks a raging fire. But most of them, it turns out, are simple. Just a cave collapse; a buckling of infrastructure.

-

Tim’s favorite ice cream is butter pecan. He is always disappointed when the shops don’t have it. 

“We could call ahead,” Melanie always tells him. He is clinging to her wrist this time, her in charge of steering them. The white-tipped cane swings wildly in all directions. She is still getting the hang of it. Tim’s much better, more focused on the noise it makes from concrete to asphalt to garden even while he’s talking. 

“Where’s the fun of that,” he laughs. “This way, it’s an adventure.”

Her shoe hits an uneven crack in the sidewalk that she didn’t hear beforehand; she stumbles, but he roots in place and grabs her, reeling her back in. 

“See?” he says as she huffs and starts tapping the cane again, this time with _purpose_. “An adventure.”

-

She used to rappel down old excavating zones. She used to scrape her knees on the broken glass of abandoned county hospitals. She used to sleep overnight in boarded up rookeries to tempt the echoed calls of restless spirits. 

“An adventure,” she whispers, when she thinks Tim is asleep. She presses her fingertips to his cheek bones, his chin, the soft skin of his lips. On his neck she can feel rough outlines of corkscrew scars. 

He shifts his head down and forwards under her touch. His mouth finds her fingers again, and kisses them absently. 

“You awake?” she whispers.

“No,” he says. She hears the corners of his lips turned up. “My eyes are closed.”

He kisses her, again and again and again. There is no rush. There is nothing waiting in the dark.

-

The problem rarely happens when things are carefully planned; when they are slow. A mountain can stand for an awfully long time after being scooped clean inside. 

The problem is when something hollows it out all at once. 

-

“We can take you to the hospital.”

She shakes her head. She grits her teeth. She will _not_ go. She will _not._

“Melanie.”

No. No, no. She forms her hands into tightened fists and slams them into the shower walls to the rhythm of her brain: _no-no-no-no_.

“Come on, it’s okay. It’s okay. I don’t want you to hurt yourself, come on. It’s okay.”

The water is getting colder by the second, but Tim is still there, still holding her against his chest, whispering and rocking her and she wants to tear his throat out with her teeth. 

“I’ve got you,” he tells her. She hates him so much. She hopes he dies with her. She hopes they drown here in their shitty little shower stall with barely enough room for them. She hopes her knuckles burst and he cuts himself on the bone. 

“I’ve got you,” he tells her. “Come on, come on, I’ve got you.”

She is shivering. She is sitting on their bed, wrapped in a towel too big for her. Her mouth tastes like stomach acid and mint toothpaste. 

“I threw up?” she asks. 

He is braiding her hair. She thought about cutting it short again, just for ease, but he’s good at this. “Twice,” he tells her. “Only once on me.”

She opens her mouth to say _sorry_. But they banned that word three weeks ago. There’s a twenty pence fee now. 

“What was it?” she asks. Her throat burns, now that she notices. 

“I was listening to some crap TV,” Tim tells her. “Think they went into a cave or something. Audio had an echo.”

Melanie nods.

“Hey,” Tim says. “Don’t move. I’m working here.”

She holds perfectly still. His fingers seek out stray strands of hair. She falls into the rhythm of his breathing. 

-

They have an aide who comes by once a week, to do the things the two of them haven’t worked out a way around yet. Clean up some of the grime they don’t notice gathering up. Take the laundry to the laundromat and separate it out by colors. Tell them they ought to get a cat.

“You two seem like cat people,” she tells them cheerfully. “Pets are known to really brighten moods.”

“No thank you,” they keep telling her, but she keeps bringing it up, even after Tim manages to wrangle a picture of the Admiral for her. 

“You have plenty of space,” she tells them while she’s checking expiration dates in the fridge. “What’s your biggest concern about pet ownership?”

Melanie shrugs. Vet visits worry her. Not knowing where the thing is. Tripping over it in the night and breaking her neck. 

“Too many eyes,” Tim says, deadpan, and she laughs so hard she barely hears the shocked sputtering of the aide or Tim’s low, throaty chuckle that resonates in her chest. 

-

It is an awful thing to miss the Slaughter. To feel the cavernous hollow where it once nestled against the white bone of her leg. 

It is more awful still to see the aftermath of the cave-in that sits inside of Tim. 

-

She wakes up to a cold bed and a sick feeling in her stomach.

She follows it out to the living room, then the kitchen. His ragged breathing isn’t exactly _quiet_ — and once he hears her, he starts sniffling too, trying to wipe away undoubtedly an incredible amount of snot coating his face. He is, she has learned, an ugly crier. 

“Mind if I join you?” she asks, feeling her way towards him. She sinks down beside him and holds out her hands.

He gives her the bottle. 

She sniffs it and scowls. “Rum?” she says. “You hate rum.”

“Mm,” he agrees. His voice sounds fucking shot. “Thought it was bourbon til I tasted it.”

She takes a sip. He’s put away half the bottle before she found him. One of these days, they should talk about that.

One of these days, they should talk about a lot of things. 

“So what is it,” she asks softly. “Birthday?”

He shivers next to her. She leans in until their shoulders touch, and his shaking absorbs into her. 

“No,” he says. “Opposite.”

Melanie hums. She screws the cap back on the rum and sets it on the counter above their heads, and then she wraps herself around him the best she can at a foot shorter and five stone lighter. 

“Five years?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. Five years. But it wasn’t even, um. It wasn’t even that, really.”

Melanie scratches her fingers through his stubble. She breathes against him. She waits — she tries so hard to be patient for him. 

“I have this picture of him on my phone,” Tim says slowly. She can hear his lungs choking him again. “Just a regular picture. Just to remember. And I — I never showed you, did I?”

Melanie breathes. She breathes. The doctors said the tear ducts of her left eye were badly damaged by the awl and could be prone to infection later. She breathes.

“No,” she says, because she does not lie and he does not believe her when she does. “No. Will you tell me about him, instead?”

He cries, in these great awful sobs that toss her like twenty foot waves.

-

“Is that all set, then?”

The aide nods. “The store people said this would be a good sized tank for him,” she says. “And that it should be all set now with the water and things that I got.”

Melanie grins. “Thank you,” she says. “Seriously, thank you.”

She hears Tim’s footsteps exiting from his afternoon nap. “Oh,” he says, at the sound of rushing water. “Finally using that old aquarium from Martin? What’d you get for it?”

Melanie presses her fingers to the glass. She imagines the fish swimming up to her, nibbling them one by one. She can imagine anything she likes. 

“Cave tetra,” she tells him.

Tim grins. She can hear it in the way he kisses her. “Brilliant,” he says. “Stubbornly, wonderfully brilliant.”

-

There is no dignity in this.

In living, yes. In adapting, yes. In stepping off a curb and learning oh, that is where the sidewalk ends, this is where I turn from here, this is how to navigate the world on one less stream of input — yes. There is dignity in all of that.

But there is no dignity in a mining disaster. In a casualty. In being buried under fifteen tons of rock and chewing off your own leg.

They are not in search of dignity. 

Survival, for now, will do. 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me @besselfcn!


End file.
